Twenty years ago, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, two East African countries came to blows, fighting a “Six-Day War” that the world has forgotten now but whose pain persists.
The anniversary of the battle between Rwanda and Uganda is being remembered internationally with just one event — the launch of a documentary selected for the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
The conflict was a bloody footnote to the wider Congo War of 1998-2003 which sucked nine African countries into its maw and resulted in millions of deaths.
Backed by Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia, Laurent-Desire Kabila, then-President of the DRC, turned his back on former allies Rwanda and Uganda, who had helped him overthrow the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in May 1997.
But Kabila still had no control over the East of the country in a vast region the size of continental western Europe.
And it was here that Rwanda and Uganda were jostling to dominate the glorious mineral riches of the region, either directly or through armed surrogates.
At Kisangani, the fifth largest city in the DRC, which straddles a diamond-rich region and is the gateway to the mighty Congo River, fighting between their armed forces erupted on June 5th 2000.
According to a 2010 UN report, the two sides poured down artillery and mortar rounds on each other, killing between 244 to 760 civilians and wounding about a thousand others, and destroying hundreds of buildings in the center of the city until the fighting stopped on 10 June.
“I remember seeing dogs devouring bodies littering the streets, the stench, our neighbours’ grief and the joy of people who realised they were still alive,” said Dieudo Hamadi, who was 15 years old at the time.
Hamadi is the maker of the documentary “En Route pour le Milliard” (“Downstream to Kinshasa”) which describes how victims make a perilous trip to the capital to plead for compensation.
It is part of the official selection of films for Cannes, although the festival has been scrapped in its physical form this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In December 2005, the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ), in response to a complaint by the DRC, found Uganda guilty of “looting, plundering and exploitation.”
Uganda was additionally condemned for “occupying” the eastern province of Ituri and “actively extending” military and other support to armed groups on the DRC’s soil.
In January 2006, in a DRC lawsuit against Rwanda, the ICJ claimed that it had no jurisdiction to adjudicate.
The ICJ also ruled in favor of compensation, after 1998, for the effects of Uganda ‘s invasion.
The DRC has demanded up to $ 10 billion (EUR 8.9 billion), but not one penny has been paid — a situation that continues to rank to this day.
Marking the 20th anniversary of the bloodshed in Kisangani, 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege urged the DRC to “pursue negotiations with Uganda” to enforce the 2005 decision.
Mukwege, a gynaecologist who helps victims of sexual violence in the still troubled east, also pleaded for “sincere dialog” with Rwanda and the establishment of a “international DRC criminal court.”
In a ceremony at a cemetery in Kisingani where victims of the “Six-Day War” are buried, provincial governor Louis-Marie Wale on Friday vowed “justice will come”.
But Jose des Chartes Menga, a local journalist, said the trauma of that time was still keenly felt and many in Kisangani felt neglected.
“Our wounds have still not fully healed. We don’t feel a real involvement by the government to redress what happened in Kisangani 20 years ago,” he said.
Pierre Kibaka, who heads a group of human rights, said that the passage of time would make it difficult for each family to allocate meaningful reparations.
“There are symbolic reparations which can be done,” he suggested. “You could build a hospital, a school, even a monument to the victims.”
The June 2000 events were entangled with the Second Congo War toxic political legacy.
Right up until 2018, when the long reign of Kabila ‘s son, Joseph Kabila, who became president after his father was assassinated in January 2001, ended, the DRC had tense relations with both Rwanda and Uganda.
One of his successor’s first missions, Felix Tshisekedi, was to go on a fence-mending voyage to Kigali and Kampala.
But resentment among many Congolese is still strong — they accuse the two eastern neighbors of the country , especially Rwanda, of seeking to “balkanise” their rich mineral wealth in the eastern DRC.
